But in the new vehicle, said Lenaerts, principal harpist of the Vienna Philharmonic, they could take out a middle seat and push the harp inside.
“I was lucky my parents didn’t say, ‘Sorry, Anneleen, just choose the saxophone,'” she said with a laugh over lunch at a cafe across the street from Musikverein, where the musicians were on a break before an almost monthlong tour of Japan and China in November. “I may be one of the only harpists in the world who does not have a driver’s license because when other people were on school holidays learning to drive, I was traveling so much.”
It’s unlikely that Lenaerts, 31, will be making a New Year’s resolution to get that license because there simply isn’t room in her busy schedule. In 2018 she has crisscrossed the globe, performing with the Vienna Philharmonic and playing solo concerts in places as diverse as Bruges, Belgium, and Bogotá, Colombia.
Gustavo Dudamel, the rock star musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, hand-picked Lenaerts to play with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra when he was its guest conductor on a tour across Europe in September. That same month, Kalevi Aho’s “Mearra,” which the composer wrote especially for her, had its Finnish premiere.
“Anneleen is a real virtuoso of her instrument,” Aho wrote in an email. “Her technical virtuosity, her kind personality and her great flexibility in different musical styles are, in my opinion, the reasons why she is as a harpist so in demand.”
Growing up in the Flemish town of Peer, Lenaerts took up the piano at the age of 8. The next year, when the conductor of their local symphonic wind orchestra, Koninklijke Harmonie van Peer, decided he wanted a harpist, he chose her for the instrument.
“I wanted to play the oboe or the clarinet so I could have a little case to go to rehearsals,” she said. “Usually girls choose the harp because they have seen ‘The Nutcracker’ and they like ballet, but what I knew about the harp was that it gave you calluses on your fingers. I was not a typical girly-girl, so the harp did not attract me because it was so poetic, I just gave it a go.”
It soon became very obvious to all who heard her play that Lenaerts was a gifted musician; from 1997 to 2010 she won more than 20 prizes and awards in international competitions. By 15 she was working professionally and, after completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in three years at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, she went to Paris to train with the solo harpist Isabelle Perrin, all the while continuing to perform with orchestras across Europe.
“I realized how amazingly talented she was and how quickly she could not only learn something but also understand it, which is more difficult,” said Perrin, who met Lenaerts when she was 12. “I would say she is one of the top five players in the world, but she has kept that kindness and openness that is so rare when people get to that level.”
In 2010, while in Munich performing with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under conductor Mariss Janson, Lenaerts learned there would soon be an opening for a harpist with the Vienna Philharmonic. “I was very happy being a soloist, and I never wanted to enter an orchestra,” she said, recalling her hesitation before she decided to go for the tryouts.
“I was ‘No. 9’ for the audition, and it was behind a curtain. I was thinking, ‘If this does not go well, I will just go back to Belgium and nobody will ever know.'” She won the audition — at just 23 — and moved to Vienna the next autumn.
“Since her engagement as a member of the Vienna Philharmonic, Anneleen has proven to be an outstanding musician with great excellence,” Daniel Froschauer, the chairman of the orchestra and its first violinist, wrote in an email. “She is a wonderful colleague.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.